“That’s just crazy..!”

       The Making Of Hose.

STORAGE AND BACK_UP

We ended up over shooting considerably, especially with the re-shoots. By the time we’re done we will have filled 28 LaCie 250Gb drives with Data. Why so many drives, you ask?

For starters, the are all backed up, so for each drive there is a mirror of itself. So its actually 14 drives of data. We captured about 16,700 still images. Which are each 8mb as a RAW file or 46mb as PSD files. The images alone is totals over 900,000mb. Then each file has a After Effects file, a Quicktime reference file (often more than one) and then DVCPro files, HD work files and final master files. A 2 second uncompressed HD file for instance, can easily be 2Gb in size…

We chose LaCie 250GB drives as I found them to be the most reliable, if you look after them. We never transported them without being inside one of the boxes they came in. We also let the drives spin down before disconnecting them (place your hand on top and wait until you feel the vibration wind down.) Given how much data we would acquire we could have gone to a larger size disk, like a 320 or a 500GB. My feeling on this was that if we lost a drive, I’d rather be backing up 250 GB than 500GB.

Retrospect 6.1 was used to create the mirror drives and luckily I have not had any issues with the drives, as word-on-the-street is that its not easy building a new drive with Retrospect. I’d suggest doing more research on this (Apple’s Leopard OS now has a back up system that looks interesting.)

Once the Final HD files were created, they were copied over onto our Apple Xserve RAID drive. If you’re unfamiliar with HD and plan to work with it, one of the most important things to know is the data rate required to watch the files. Uncompressed 4:2:2 HD  runs at about 188Mb/s while NTSC at about 25Mb/s, in-other-words, you need a fat pipe to be able to move all that data quickly. Hence the RAID system, which is connected to the computer via fiber optic cables and an ATTO fiber channel card.